The Structure of the OT As a Historical Record

Having addressed somewhat theoretical issues about history and theology and the characteristics of OT history, it is important now to look at the record in its canoni-cal shape in order to determine what pattern, if any, informs the presentation of the narrative, and (2) what significance attaches to each section and to the whole viewed collectively.

The focal point of OT history: The Plains of An ordinary reading of the OT leads naturally to the view that the story begins with Genesis. And such a view is correct insofar as the present order of the account is concerned; but when one exam-ines the question of the Sitz Leben that elicited Genesis as well as the rest of the Torah (and the entire OT, for that matter), one quickly conies to a radically different conclusion. The Bible's own perspective is that Israel possessed little or no literature it considered religiously authoritative (revelatory) prior to having composed the Pentateuch, an accomplishment completed just before his death in Moab (Deut 31:24-29).

Admittedly, the tradition nowhere explicitly asserts Mosaic authorship of Gene-sis or even Leviticus, but it does attest clearly to his having written parts or all of Exod (17:14; 24:4, 7; 34:27), (33:1-2), and Deut (31:9, And, of course, this was the unanimous opinion expressed by the remainder of the OT (Josh 8:31;

1 Kgs 2:3; 2 Kgs 14:6; Ezra Neh postbiblical Jewish tradition 14b-15a; Josephus, Ad 1:8), and the NT (Matt 19:8; John 5:46-47;

7:19; Acts 3:22). The universally recognized unity of the Pentateuch from earliest times also argues presumptively for the antiquity of the Bible's own witness to the role of Moses as author/compiler of the entire collection and Longman, 37).

Granting this the occasion calling forth the of the ancient Hebrew tradition immediately becomes clear. The audience before Moses had witnessed the mighty acts of God at Sinai, and many of the elders among them had actually participated in the most significant of Exodus and the forging of the Sinai covenant relationship with They had all heard of the promises to their patriarchal ancestors, particularly those having to do with the land of Canaan, the very land they could see to the west, across the Jordan. How much they knew about the remote past is, of course, unknown. It is inconceivable that they were bereft of all his-torical resources, even written texts, but it is fruitless to speculate as to the nature and extent of these.

The immediate situation demanded certain clarifications and responses by Moses. He, theocratic leader for forty years, was denied access to the Promised Land. Under what circumstances, then, were they authorized to proceed further? Even under command, what possible political, moral, or even theological justifica-tion did they have for crossing the river, dismantling the Canaanite fortificajustifica-tions, con-quering the settlements, and slaughtering men, women, and children? These and other questions must have been troubling indeed.

Faced with these issues, Moses undertook to provide a fully comprehensive account of his they were, whence they came, how they related to the nations of the world, and, most important, what role they were to play in the design of Yahweh their God. He had elected, redeemed, and made covenant with

they what did it all mean in light of a universal, overarching purpose? A canonical response is to be seen in the the massive composition that provided Israel with a raison d'etre and, incidentally almost, with a context broad enough to include Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and the dispersion of the human race. It was out of these universal events and concerns that Israel had sprung precisely to address redemptively the implications of world history. It might be said, then, that the OT his-torical account began in Moab on the eve of the conquest of Canaan (Merrill,

2. Exodus-Numbers: The constitution of a nation. From perspective the most pressing need was to provide a review of the recent past, that commenc-ing with their sojourn in Egypt and subsequent departure. Such a suggestion can by no means be based on textual data, for the record is silent as to precisely when Moses composed his history and in what order. Theologically and logically the case can be made that matters of immediate concern would first be addressed and then those more remote (Gen). Deut, it seems, would have completed the collection, serving as it did as both a summation and a prospective.

the preface to an itinerary beginning with the Exodus and ending in the plains of Moab (vv. 5-49), states that "at the command Moses recorded the stages in their journey" (v. 2). The tradition thus asserts that either Moses kept records throughout the course of events, which he then collected into the present account (Exod 12:37-Num 33:49), or he composed the account de novo on the basis of his recollections (Ashley, 623; Budd, The former is, of course, more likely.

By "stages of the journey" is meant more than a jejune listing of sites. It is clearly a way of referring to the whole course of history associated with these places. Not to be overlooked is the reference to Aaron's death in "the fortieth year after the Israelites came out of Egypt" (Num 33:38). This presupposes that the written history as repre-sented in the tradition was completed near the very end of life.

The beginning of the itinerary is not coterminous with the beginning of Israel's history but only with that part of it that followed the Exodus. But that was a crucial his-torical juncture, not just because of the unparalleled event of the Exodus deliverance itself, but because it marked the transition from being a rather loosely defined people to their being a bona fide nation. The act of national formation was the contract made at Sinai, to be sure, but Exodus redemption was essential to the process leading up to that status.

On the other hand, being merely a people did not suggest something less than a historical reality. Many (if not most) nations have a stage in which various social, political, and ethnic elements coalesce for whatever reason into entities desig-nated as kingdoms, nations, states, or the like. There was thus a clear understanding by Israel of its prenational character as a in bondage to a superpower, to be

even of its ancient roots in a line of patriarchal ancestors.

According to their commonly held tradition, fleshed out now by Moses in writ-ing for perhaps the first time, Israel consisted of descendants of twelve sons of Jacob, a man whose name was changed to the eponymous surrogate Israel (Exod Jacob

himself sprang from Abraham, the recipient of elective, covenant grace and the true founder of the nation. Exod, Lev, and regularly refer back to this ances-tral origination of the nation with the intention of demonstrating that Israel was not an ad hoc, spontaneous generation from disparate folk but rather was the national embod-iment of promises made to common forefathers (Exod 2:24; 3:6, 15, 16; 4:5; 6:3, 8;

32:13; Lev 26:42; Num

Within the corpus itself, the hinge of history revolves around the Sinai covenant. All that leads up to it (Exod 1 is preparatory to it and all that fol-lows it (Exod 25-Num 36) is in consequence of it. Nowhere is the theological shaping of history more clear than here, for the making of covenant, unwitnessed by the nations of earth and hence unimportant to them, became the controlling feature and factor in Israel's historical and even eschatological life. At Sinai her course was set as the servant people whose deliverance from Egypt was precisely for the purpose of entering into the privileges and responsibilities of covenant relationship. Adherence to or defection from its terms would determine Israel's future destiny as a nation, a point made most emphatically in Lev 26:3-45.

3. Genesis: The history of Israel's origins. Critical that which is open to the possibility of historical nuclei in nearly univer-sally in opposition to the description of Gen as history. Beginning with Gunkel it has become fashionable to speak of the various elements of the book as myth, saga, legend, novella, and almost anything else but history (Coats, passim). It is likewise a dogma of some recent scholarship that Moses had nothing to do with the composition of Gen but that, in fact, it is primarily the product of the creative pen of Israel's great postexilic theologian, the (Van Seters, 1992, 332).

This critical construct of the creation of Gen as literature and its historical authenticity is, of course, at variance with the Bible's own witness, the only voice to which theologians should give heed if they wish to understand Israel's own portrayal of her faith. That witness (implicitly) and later Jewish-Christian tradition (explicitly) concur that Moses was responsible for that great foundational text of the Pentateuch.

We must still see how that text contributes to the theological character of OT history.

As suggested above, the OT picture is that of Moses, east of Canaan, burdened to communicate to his people in a permanent form a message by which they could understand who they were, how they originated, and what purpose they were to serve as the covenant people of Yahweh. This required a sketch of their history to that point, first as a people delivered from Egyptian bondage to become at Sinai a covenant nation, and second as descendants of a common father who found themselves in Egypt in the first place. What was required next was a narrative linkage between themselves and those ancestors of ancient times.

That narrative is Genesis. The tradition is silent as to how Moses (or any author) gained access to the events of that pre-Mosaic era, though perhaps terms such as might suggest written texts (cf. Gen 2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1;

27; 19; 36:1, 9; 37:2) 547-51). But this is not important to the Bible's viewpoint, for the real issue is how Gen functions as a prolegomenon to Israel's history. That it did so is clear from internal biblical evidence, such as the already adduced references in Exod-Num to the patriarchs and the promises made to them that constituted Israel's historical and theological underpinnings.

Another linkage is the overlapping information of the end of Gen (50:22-26) and beginning of Exod especially the blunt statement "and Joseph died" (Gen 50:26; Exod Thus one era ends ("he was placed in a coffin in Egypt") and another begins ("the Israelites were fruitful and multiplied greatly and became exceedingly numerous," Exod 1:7).

Gen as history takes the form of an alternating pattern of enlargement and con-striction. It begins with the original couple, Adam and Eve, whose offspring proliferate to the point that "men began to increase in number on the earth" (Gen The judg-ment of the Flood reduces this number to his wife, their three sons, and their wives (7:13). Again there is expansion as the descendants of Noah's sons become

"nations spread out over the earth" (10:32). The next constriction is not of a physical that reduced the human race to a biological a remnant of a theological character. Out of all the peoples and nations of the earth, a single man is called to be the progenitor of a new line, a seed that would issue into a great redemp-tive force designed to bless humanity by effecting reconciliation between God and his fallen creation Like a new Adam or a second Noah this man, Abraham, launched once more the process of enlargement, one that in time resulted in the extrav-agant language of Exod "the land [of Egypt] was filled with them."

Israel at Moab must be instructed as to this course of events, this history that accounted for who they, the "exceedingly numerous" multitude, really were. They must understand that they were not just an accident of history, one nation among many others, but that they were, in a sense, the very axis of history. The history of the world led to him and that of the world led to them. At once an awesome privilege and an onerous responsibility, their role, Moses taught, was to be "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Exod a people whose very exist-ence and whose claims to the land of Canaan found justification in all the elective choices that were so clearly laid out in the Gen history.

4. Deuteronomy: The paradigm of Israel's history. It is commonplace in mod-ern OT scholarship to date the book of Deut in its present form to the exilic or even postexilic period, while conceding that it existed in a recension known as the "Book of the Law" somewhat earlier than the reign of King (ca. 650 BC; cf. 2 Kgs 22-23).

But the view also prevails that Deut provides the ideological framework or touchstone against which the deut. history was composed. This collection, Joshua-2 Kings, is thus construed to be a history of Israel from Moses to King whose guiding edi-torial principle is the degree to which the nation did or did not conform to the deut.

covenant mandates (Nicholson, 1967, 121-24).

A problem immediately presents itself here in that it is difficult to see how Israel could have been expected to live by deut. requirements in a time earlier than the composition of the book. Furthermore, how can the deut. history realistically portray past as one whose ebb and flow was indicative of the extent to which it con-formed to as yet unwritten covenant principles? The usual resolution is to suggest (a) that the deut. tradition might greatly antedate its in going back in nucleus to Moses (b) that the historical account of deut. history is a "theologized" version; i.e., one that is aware of the facts of Israel's history but that feels free to relate and interpret those facts so as to bring them into line with cause-and-effect nexus (Van Seters, 1983, 228, 360-61). When Israel was obedient to

the Mosaic covenant stipulations, she was blessed; when she disobeyed, she experi-enced its curses. Further attention to the Deut-deut. history relationship follows in the next section.

Next to Leviticus, perhaps, Deut is the least overtly writing in the Pentateuch. From one perspective, it is essentially a collection of sermons and other addresses by Moses who, his time of death, has an intense desire to rehearse covenant faithfulness to Israel in the past and to prepare them for the life to come in Canaan. The text, therefore, is peppered with exhortation, praise, blame, encouragement, and threat. But modern scholarship also recognizes another way of assessing Deut: It is a massive covenant document. Without entering into the debate as to the precise cultural milieu reflected by the form and content of the book, it is safe to say that most scholars identify Deut as a composition at least loosely modeled after a suzerain-vassal treaty text. It clearly contains all the elements attested to by that genre.

Different from these models, however, are the persistent historical currents that flow through the book of Deut. This is in addition to the first four chapters, which, as a discrete element of a covenant text, may be called the "historical prologue" and there-fore are patently historical in literary form. Other instances of historical reflection are found in 5:1-5, 22-33; 9:7-10:11; 23:3-8; 24:9; 25:17-19; 26:5b-9; 29:2-9; 32:6-18, 50-52. And, of course, the book concludes with the narrative of death and burial an historical vignette.

The purpose of the historical references in Deut is primarily pedagogical: The Israel of the present and future should learn from the Israel of the past. The

selective use of historical episodes provides helpful insight into the theological appro-priation of history. Thus, when Moses announces covenant renewal, he refers back to the earlier occasion of covenant-making at Sinai in order to make appropriate compari-sons and contrasts (Deut When he attempts to prepare the people for the Con-quest (9:1-5), he reminds them of how disobedient they had been in the past, particularly in the incident of the golden calf, and what disastrous results ensued Finally, he exhorts them to keep covenant on the basis of God's faithful-ness to them in the Exodus and the desert sojourn (29:2-9). Even a static covenant rela-tionship, then, issues from historical encounters and must be lived out in historical experience.

5. Joshua-2 Kings: An assessment of Israel's historical and theological experi-ence. We noted in the previous section that the OT books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings have come to be known as the deut. history because they appear to narrate Israel's history in terms of its conformity to or rejection of the covenant ideals of Deut.

One may question the critical presuppositions that gave rise to this approach, but that these books reflect deut. concerns can hardly be doubted. In fact, such a relationship provides facie evidence for the Bible's own witness as to the authorship and provenance of Deut. That is, the chronological and theological priority of Deut is exactly what one would expect if indeed deut. history already posits a deut. frame of reference (McConville, 73-78).

To return to the issue at deut. history as a theological

are numerous references in the material suggestive of its character as such. Never is there good, objective reason for doubting the truth claims of the text, even when it

rehearses the supernatural acts of Joshua, Elijah, or but neither can one claim that it is ordinary historiography. It is historical narrative of a highly selective, tenden-tious, and interpretive nature, designed not merely to recount events but to explain them as part of a larger pattern of divine design and intention.

Nowhere is this seen better than in the lengthy observation by the historian as to the decline and fall of the northern kingdom Israel in 722 BC. After recounting the reign of the last king, Hoshea (2 Kgs he goes on to comment on the disastrous end of this reign by linking it to the inevitable consequences of centuries of covenant infidelity (vv. 7-23). "All this [the Assyrian deportation of Israel] took place," the his-torian-theologian says, "because the Israelites had sinned against the LORD their God, who had brought them up out of Egypt from under the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt" (v. 7). Reaching back even before the founding of the monarchy, he speaks of Israel's worship of the gods of Canaan as the epitome of that sin against (v. 8).

This same historian, or others like him, had to this point laboriously reviewed the details of Israel's history, but here in this summation all else is sublimated to the essential point that it was the sin of theological treason that ultimately called down the holy wrath of Yahweh. One cannot escape the impression that the entire record, then, was shaped with this central focus in view. Indeed, a close reading of the entire deuter-onomistic history can lead to no other conclusion. It is history and it is to be believed, but it is history that ignores everything that does not contribute to the central idea of covenant violation as well as history that concentrates on precisely those events that

This same historian, or others like him, had to this point laboriously reviewed the details of Israel's history, but here in this summation all else is sublimated to the essential point that it was the sin of theological treason that ultimately called down the holy wrath of Yahweh. One cannot escape the impression that the entire record, then, was shaped with this central focus in view. Indeed, a close reading of the entire deuter-onomistic history can lead to no other conclusion. It is history and it is to be believed, but it is history that ignores everything that does not contribute to the central idea of covenant violation as well as history that concentrates on precisely those events that